Page 42 of Fortress of Ambrose
Towering over me, he hinges at the neck, bringing his mouth a breath away from mine. His nerves settle. Golden light from the setting sun catches in his unruly strands of hair. He’s so close, my lips part. I’ve stopped breathing.
“Self-control happens to be something I’m very good at.” His breath on my lips sends a rush of heat all over my body. I lean toward him, daring him to kiss me. But he puts distance between us and heads to the door. I can’t decide if I’m annoyed or impressed.
Eighteen
Jordan
Yani is expecting me when I descend the basement stairs.
The room is sparsely furnished but clean. There’s a bed, a full bathroom, and a small table with two stools. Yani cleans a scrape on her arm. She wears dark red pants with a red corset over a sheer long-sleeved top, which is torn at the shoulder. Her diadem sparkles, gunmetal silver with bright blue gems. It’s the only part of her that doesn’t look haggard. I set the change of clothes Knox gave me for her and a plate of dinner on the table.
“Are you alright?” I ask.
“Sometimes it feels like you’ve forgotten who I am.”
Beaulah trained her to wear masks well. But ironically, it was being with Yani that forced me to learn how to see through them.
“I hope you weren’t too shaken up.”
She rolls her eyes, but she’s as unconvincing as she was the night I stepped in to save her life. I was sixteen. She and some Perl peers dragged me out to attend one of Charlie’s raids. When she tried to single-handedly apprehend a dangerous target, he almost choked her to death right there in the middle of a nightclub. I stepped in, and Charlie showed up. The target let her go, but the moment moved on as if Yani wasn’t just gasping for air. Charlie didn’t even address it. But I did. Even then, Yani didn’t flinch. She was “fine.” It wasn’t until she snuck into my room that night and curled up next to me that I really saw through her.
“I know who you are better than you do sometimes,” I say.
She laughs. “You still flatter yourself, I see.” She moves from the stool to the edge of the table. “You think these safe house freaks are going to kill me?”
“Depends. Are you ready to be honest about why you’re here?”
“Mother made me leave. It’s true.” There is an earnestness that gleams in her eyes. But she fiddles with a silver buckle on her corset.
“I remember when we first met,” I say. “Everything with you is a strategy.”
“You’re still not over that kiss?” She grinned, a real smile that hugs her eyes.
“You walked up to me at my birthday party andkissed me! I was fifteen, surrounded by all my friends. And then you didn’t say a word to me for a year.”
“You loved it.”
It was the only thing I thought about for the next year. A girlkissedme. And not just any girl, but the one everyone whispered about being so pretty. Did that mean she liked me? She didn’t talk to me after that. Did that mean I was a bad kisser? Back then my head spun every time I thought of it.
“It was an angle,” I say. “You admitted as much when we…”
“Broke up.”
The two syllables crack in my head like thunder, taking me back to that vicious fight we had. A year after the kiss, I’d worked up the courage to approach her and ask her to the Tidwell. We danced all night. I was sixteen, recklessly confident, well mannered. She was into Jordan with the big ego. Gone was the insecure boy she’d made blush at his birthday party.
By the end of the ball, I dropped her off and told her I wanted to kiss her again. Just one kiss could last me another year, I told myself. She gave me permission and spent the night with me. The next morning I smelled like her. We only saw each other a few times a year. It felt likeI was dangling from a string. She was the cat, I was the toy, no matter how hard I tried to maintain the upper hand. She insisted we shouldn’t get too attached, and yet all I could think of when she was gone was her. She never asked me for loyalty and shamed the idea, never reciprocating when I said I loved her. But back then, no matter who I was with, it was Yani I imagined.
“I don’t know if I’d call it a breakup, because it wasn’t really a relationship.”
She admitted that at my fifteenth birthday party Beaulah had told her to get close to me. She knew I’d be Ward one day in House of Marionne, and she wanted eyes on me to make sure that my loyalties hadn’t wavered.
Yani was dead to me then.
And I’ve never looked back.
“Sixteen-year-old Jordan wouldn’t have said that.”
My cheeks heat, images of her I should not remember flashing in my mind. She hops off the table, moving toward me, and Quell’s warning plays on repeat in my mind.
